Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two are connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations in the leadership. Many Black fighters were dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression” to find out more.”

Part II explored how the international communist movement was the impetus of the Civil Rights Movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College. Part III covered the class contradictions of Martin Luther King, Jr., as influenced by the Communist Party.  
Part IV takes a look at the Harlem Rebellion and its communist influence.

The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 shook the United States bosses and resonated around the world as the struggle against racism expanded from the fight against Jim Crow in the South to the cities of the North. Once again the communist movement helped lead and was deeply influenced by the fight against racism in the U.S.

The rebellion, sparked by the police killing a young Black man in cold blood, occurred at a moment when the working class around the world was rising up, led by the communist movement centered around the Chinese Communist Party. The fledgling Progressive Labor Movement born out of the rise of the working class in China, was also shaped by the Harlem Rebellion.

KKKops murder child in cold blood

In July 1964, 15 year-old James Powell was playing with friends on the sidewalk across from his school in the white neighborhood of Yorkville, when a building superintendent sprayed them down with a hose and unleashed a series of racial epithets at the Black children. The school kids ran to the super to get him to stop, and a cop, Thomas Gilligan, watching from across the street came at the group and shot James Powell in front of numerous witnesses.

Immediately about 300 Black students from the school rallied at the site of the murder and confronted the police on the scene demanding Gilligan’s arrest and inspiring the rebellion.

Two days of peaceful protests ensued. But on the third day, a crowd surrounded the police precinct, calling for Gilligan’s arrest, and was met with swinging clubs of the New York Police Department. Rainfall of glass bottles and garbage can lids was thrown by residents from rooftops above. Gunfire broke out after police pushed thousands of demonstrators back a few blocks toward the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue '' (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).

Communist movement sparked Black workers’ rebellions

The rebellion started only weeks after the U.S. had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which was Lyndon Johnson’s response to the growing Civil Rights Movement in the South. That movement and the world-wide movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was politicizing the working class. The working class in China, had been victimized by the brutality of British, Japanese and U.S. imperialism.  The history of imperialism was inseparable from the racist theories of the British ruling class. The victory of the working class in China inspired workers all over the world to rise up against imperialism and sharpened the struggle against racism. In Vietnam, the working class was in the process of defeating the largest imperialist power the world had ever seen, the war machine of the U.S. bosses.  In the U.S., even as legal segregation and racism was being brought down in the South, Black workers in the North were taking on the embedded racism of liberal capitalism.

The overwhelming majority of Black New Yorkers saw their quality of life decline, whether it’s school segregation, housing segregation, unemployment, earnings… [in the] period between the end of World War II and the 1964 riot… “This was Northern racism, which was quite different from Southern racism, in that Northern racism was covert,” says Joseph Boskin, history professor emeritus at Boston University.

Racism is the lifeblood of capitalism

Boskin, who conducted interviews in Harlem after the [rebellion], says the unmet expectations of Black Americans in the North were starting to push some of them toward more militant routes for change, despite a national narrative of what seemed to be progress in the country’s laws” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).

The Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), the young forerunner to Progressive Labor Party (PLP), grew out of the rebellion and played a leading role at the same time. PLM produced a poster, ‘Wanted for Murder - Gilligan the Cop” that became the banner of the struggle carried by thousands of people in the streets. The PLM organized marches and rallies even after the New York City bosses tried to ban all political activity.

The ruling class in New York, who thought of themselves as the “decent” bosses compared to the Jim Crow Southern capitalists, were caught off-guard by the anger of Black workers in Harlem who suffered under extreme inequality.

The Harlem median family income was $3,995 compared to …$6,100 [for all NYC], unemployment in Harlem was 300% higher than in the rest of the city, substandard housing was 49% [of all housing] while in the rest of NYC it was 15%, infant mortality was 45.3 per 1000 births but only 26.3 in the rest of the city…Life magazine lamented that “the only force that had the guts to give political direction to the spontaneous rebellion was PL” (Progressive Labor, Vol. 10, No. 1, August-September 1975).

The Harlem Rebellion exposed racism as part of capitalism, even in U.S.’s most liberal center, NYC. After Harlem, within weeks, rebellions broke out in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago and Philadelphia and over the next few years there were major rebellions in Watts (1965), Newark (1967) and Detroit (1967). Then in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, rebellions broke out in cities across the country and workers and students around the world, most notably in France and Chicago, shook capitalism.

Liberal rulers unleash racist attacks, bury antiracist history

The ruling class has tried to write off the rebellions by calling them riots and dismissing the contribution and courage of the tens of thousands of Black workers who were part of the movement. But even now, 60 years later, the truth of the Harlem Rebellion has not been erased.
Part of the confusion is that in the North, many of the laws were not openly discriminatory,…It made it harder to seize the moral high ground and argue that nonviolent civil disobedience was justified.

So, growing frustrations found an outlet on the streets, according to Billy Mitchell, historian of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
“It wasn’t just people just wild n’ out, you know, and just going crazy. They understood what they were doing,”…
Looking back, Mitchell says he doesn’t completely condone the violent response. But he says it was necessary.
“Sometimes you have got to really do something extraordinary or uncommon to get the attention of people,” he adds.
 (In the Heat of the Summer: The Harlem Riot of 1964 and the Road to America’s Prison Crisis).

The U.S. ruling class responded to the mass demonstrations and anti-imperialist movements with both terror and political crumbs. Police and soldiers fired on and killed civil rights demonstrators and students fighting racism and war in Orangeburg, SC, Jackson State, MS and Kent State, OH.

Combined with the brutal attacks, the ruling class enacted a series of reforms in cities with concentrations of Black workers. Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty funneling millions of dollars to create community programs. The Democratic Party and northern capitalists spent millions getting Black mayors elected across the country.

The FBI revved up its Cointelpro Program. It was a covert operation to target PLP and other groups to try to destroy the anti-imperialist movement. Leaders of PLP were arrested and some were convicted and jailed, others harassed and fired. Through those struggles and in the years since we’ve tried to keep up the fight against racism and build an integrated organization.

Black workers key to communist revolution

Black workers who have borne the brunt of racism and led the fight against it must be in the leadership of any working-class struggle and movement for communism. There will be no forward progress for the working class without the leadership of Black workers and a massive struggle against racism.

BALTIMORE, MD, March 13- The West Wednesday Coalition (WC) marched and held a rally at Baltimore City Hall and the Baltimore City Police (BPD) headquarters against racist police terror. The night was in honor of Tyrone West and all victims of state-sanctioned police brutality. This makes 555 Wednesdays which the coalition has tirelessly dedicated to calling out the fake liberal bosses and their politricks—as they were described by WC. Nine members of Progressive Labor Party and 3 friends of the Party attended. We led sharp political chants and distributed our newspaper CHALLENGE to enthusiastic attendees. 

It’s now been over 10 years since 17 killer KKKops murdered Tyrone West and then covered it up. “… [T]wo plain-clothes officers in an unmarked car pulled Tyrone over in a residential neighborhood for an alleged minor traffic infraction. Witness statements indicated that he was pulled out of his car and attacked by the police. Several residents and witnesses in the neighborhood where this happened tried to intervene and were told by one of the officers (Bernardez-Ruiz) to ‘back the f— up’ and go into their houses or the same thing would happen to them (westcoalition.com).” Baltimore City government has passed lackluster reforms over the last 10 years, but the killer pigs in blue have still not been put behind bars. 

Tyrone West deserves to be here, among his family and friends, creating more of his beautiful art and inspiring others to care for one another. But the BPD took that away—a man who was the light of his sister’s life. Tyrone, like many working-class people, is a testament to the underappreciated and long-ignored beauty in a city that is victim to a criminally vile system founded on the historic oppression of working-class people of color. 

But the movement is still strong! It’s become increasingly militant! 

While a few workers who spoke promoted working within the system to enact substantial change for workers, the majority blamed capitalism for police terror, and many even called for a revolution. Speeches pointed to our need for multiracial unity against the cops and their crooked institutions. They may terrorize Black and Brown workers at drastically high rates, but they terrorize our white class siblings, too. One strength of our rally was pointing out the connection between police terror and imperialist war. During the speakout, a worker called out Baltimore City’s fascist funding of the genocide in Palestine, pointing out that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) butchers have been working in tandem with Baltimore City counterparts to learn new tactics for terrorizing workers into submission in this period of developing fascism.

With the Party’s help, the coalition has become more anti-capitalist, but we are continuing to sharpen the struggle against police terror. A comrade argued that workers all over the world need to join together, that the struggle against genocides in Palestine, Congo, Myanmar, and abroad is our struggle too, and that we need a society ruled by and for the workers—communism!

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA, March 6—Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU 689) workers celebrated improvements in wages and benefits after a solid 15-day strike against Transdev, the contractor providing bus service to county residents. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined the 650+ workers at rallies and on picket lines. We brought the message that communism is the long-term solution to our needs for a decent standard of living globally for all workers, an end to the bosses’ wars, and a solution to the climate crisis. The bosses won’t help with any of those things!

The new contract is still deficient in pensions and other benefits, but it approached parity with the much larger WMATA transit contract that covers the rail system and most of the bus system. Transdev was forced to make such concessions since almost no worker scabbed on the strike (CHALLENGE, 3/13).

The successful strike struck a blow against racism. Virtually all of the bus drivers are Black, mostly immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Transdev has relied on the old colonial approach of super-exploiting such workers, but had no choice but to back off in light of their militancy and solidarity. But until we succeed in building a revolutionary movement to topple the profit-hungry capitalist system, we will be faced with constant efforts by capitalists to use racism to push back and reduce the standard of living of all workers so they can line their pockets at our expense.

Intensified struggle looming

A series of relatively small transit strikes over the past months in Washington, DC and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs has set the tone for the “main event” – the coming expiration of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA’s) contract with over 9,000 transit workers on June 30. These Metro workers have increasingly come to realize that only antiracist class struggle has any chance of defending and advancing our interests. Workers are increasingly “strike ready!”

But WMATA is facing an operating deficit of $450 million – they will try to take this out of the hide of the working class, both those employed by Metro and those dependent on its service. Recent public hearings have shown Metro’s intent to cut workers back everywhere to solve its deficit crisis. Now is the time for workers to join the PLP to develop a collective strategy for fighting this looming battle while gaining ever greater understanding of the impossibility of capitalism to meet our needs. Trust no politician, turn to the multiracial working class for solidarity and a revolutionary communist future!

NEWTON, MASS, February 2, 2024—“When we fight, we win!” was the bold chant from the 2000-member Newton Teachers Association as they won their heroic 11-day “illegal” strike. Ninety-eight percent of the teachers picketed every day. Demands were for more social workers and behavioral therapists (needed for many students!), pay increases and work-rule changes. An excellent strike demand was for bigger pay raises for the lowest-paid staff, more of whom are Black and immigrants. It helped create unity among the various staff units. Under a communist system, we would abolish all inequality: we’d abolish money, and the working class would decide on the distribution of goods based on need.

It was the longest teachers' strike this century in Massachusetts. As in any struggle for reforms, the battle for better schools that would educate all youth will continue after the strike. Politically, we also need to be sharper as communists in exposing the role of capitalist schools in maintaining class inequality and promoting fascism and U.S. imperialism. Self-critically, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  played only a minor role in the strike, picketing and distributing over 150 leaflets to teachers and parent supporters. But we did make some new friends and introduced them to PLP’s ideas and literature.

The mayor and school committee controlling Newton schools claimed: “There's no money”. Yet, the affluent City of Newton had $55 million in surplus funds (for a “rainy day”) -- a parent said “It’s raining!” Newton schools have been under-funded for years with many Newton teachers not earning enough to buy a home in Newton or, in many cases, to rent here. Two Newton educators sell blood plasma or turn off heat to make ends meet. Even the raises won by the strikers won’t cover the increased cost of healthcare. 

All of the Newton city politicians serve the capitalist class, not students, workers, or educators. The strike stopped the city from busting the teachers union. It also showed how professionals’ living standards in the U.S. are being driven down—as Karl Marx predicted, the professionals are being proletarianized.

The courts work for the capitalist class

Communists always point out the role of the State (the capitalist government) in strikes. Massachusetts is one of 37 states with laws against teachers’ strikes. The courts first ordered an injunction against the strike and then fined the teachers' union almost  one million dollars during this strike, an extraordinary amount. Injunctions like this are part of developing fascism today as the crises of capitalism generate increasingly sharper attacks against workers in general. The Newton mayor published lies every day in her emails to the residents. The corporate media published their own fascist, blame-the-teacher lies. For example, a Boston Globe (2/5/2024) article gave space to a single anti-union businessman who attacked the teachers. Many parents and students actively supported the strike as did many other unions and individuals.

PLP attacked war, fascism, and the underfunding of education

Our leaflet pointed out how the U.S. Federal budget has roughly $1,000 billion for war and only $81 billion for education. The extra money Biden wants to give to Ukraine and Israel right now is equal to the total yearly federal education budget. Why, in the affluent suburb of Newton, does the city choose to under-fund the schools? Why, in this richest of all countries, isn't there enough money for schools, healthcare, food, or decent housing for all? The problem is the crisis of the worldwide capitalist system, with wars from Ukraine to Gaza killing hundreds of thousands. Competition among capitalists continues to intensify. Historically, capitalism in crisis did lead to fascism and war.

Today we see U.S. capitalists and their politicians, including liberals such as the Democrats, acting increasingly fascist ways.

We called for a Worker-Teacher-Parent-Student Alliance against sexism, racism, wage cuts, and imperialist war– against capitalism. We need a massive fightback, not just to win strikes, but to end the entire profit system. We need an egalitarian society. We need to support all working people internationally. We need a new political and economic system. Not the fake "communism" of today's China under Xi Jinping, but real communism: an end to the profit system and its inequities and exploitation.